Constructing the Eighteenth Century Through Adaptation in Becoming Jane, Gulliver’S Travels, and Crusoe Karen Gevirtz Seton Hall University, [email protected]
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Seton Hall University eRepository @ Seton Hall Department of English Publications Department of English 1-1-2014 Tidying as We Go: Constructing the Eighteenth Century through Adaptation in Becoming Jane, Gulliver’s Travels, and Crusoe Karen Gevirtz Seton Hall University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.shu.edu/english-publications Part of the Cultural History Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Television Commons Recommended Citation Gevirtz, Karen, "Tidying as We Go: Constructing the Eighteenth Century through Adaptation in Becoming Jane, Gulliver’s Travels, and Crusoe" (2014). Department of English Publications. 33. https://scholarship.shu.edu/english-publications/33 Seton Hall University From the SelectedWorks of Karen Bloom Gevirtz 2014 Tidying as We Go: Constructing the Eighteenth Century through Adaptation in Becoming Jane, Gulliver’s Travels, and Crusoe Karen Gevirtz, Seton Hall University Available at: https://works.bepress.com/karen_gevirtz/19/ Tidying as We go: Constructing the Eighteenth Century through Adaptation in Becoming Jane, Gulliver’s Travels , and Crusoe Karen Gevirtz Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 43, 2014, pp. 219-237 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2014.0003 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/543169 Access provided by Seton Hall University (2 Oct 2018 19:16 GMT) Tidying as We g o: c onstructing the e ighteenth c entury through a daptation in Becoming Jane, Gulliver’s Travels, and Crusoe k a Re n ge ViRTz hat exactly does a film adaptation do, and how does it go about doing Wit? For one set of critics, adaptations offer a retrospective insight into the workings of a source text.1 In this view adaptations are dependent or ancillary texts without full meaning in their own right that provide insight retrospectively into an originary text. The adaptation helps an audience to uncover a meaning for, and by extension a relevance of, the source text.2 Recently, this approach has essentially given way to an intertextual one that regards an adaptation as a valuable text in its own right, and that sees the relationship between it and its source as dialogic, so that each affects the meaning of the other.3 The time is right to complicate this intertextual approach still further by recognizing that the contexts of adaptation and source are also part of the interaction between these works. Texts inevitably interact with their contexts, whether the context of their creation or the context of their consumption or both, and texts have long been used to create or recreate an understanding not just of the present but also of the past. An adaptation can be used to construct an interpretation of a source text, but it can also construct a cultural function for the source in the source’s original moment, in the adaptation’s moment, or in any moment in between. The three adaptations discussed in this article—Becoming Jane (2007), Gulliver’s Travels (2010), and Crusoe (2008–9)—demonstrate how adaptation can function inter-contextually as well as intertextually. Each of these recent 219 220 / g e V i R T z adaptations constructs a narrative of the Anglo-American past by erasing historical conflicts involving gender, race, and empire, a maneuver with consequences for constructions of the eighteenth century, of history, and of the present. A key difference between earlier forms of adaptation theory and recent versions is the role that history or context plays in understanding the relationship between the texts. Traditional approaches assume a one-way connection between past and present. In this formulation, the past or the original text has a certain stability against which or with which the adaptation and the present moment can react or engage: there is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, for example, and then there are responses to it such as J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe or Derek Walcott’s poem “Crusoe’s Journal.” The intertextual approach on the other hand refuses to privilege chronological order. As Linda Hutcheon says: “One lesson is that to be second is not to be secondary or inferior; likewise, to be first is not to be originary or authoritative.”4 Such an egalitarian relationship has a powerful impact on the understanding and cultural capital of both texts.5 Hutcheon points out that adaptations are “haunted at all times by their adapted texts” so that when we know a prior text well, “we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly.”6 Currently, intertextual adaptation theory generally considers this impact in a positive light: Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan see film adaptations “increasing” or “enhancing” an original text or author’s “cultural capital,” for example. Critics who are less sanguine about intertextuality express concern about these interactions, particularly about the function of ideology in the relationship between source text and adaptation. Martine Voiret and Sara Maza, for instance, show how adaptations can use source texts and authors to support conservative, even misogynist, classist, and racist ideologies, ideologies that can in turn reduce the quantity or quality of the text or author’s cultural capital.7 In addition to the ideological aspects of the connection between source and adaptation, there are the contextual aspects of this connection. An adaptation not only interacts with a source text and with that text’s historical context but also with the notion of history itself, an interaction with potentially profound implications. Adaptations influence the present cultural moment through their effect on the interpretation and cultural standing of the source text and, by extension, through a construction of the source text’s original cultural moment. The impact on context is particularly evident in a type of adaptation that draws on the eighteenth century as its originary moment. Becoming Jane, Gulliver’s Travels, and Crusoe, for example, attempt to use old, perhaps hallowed or sanctified cultural objects to rewrite history and thereby rewrite the current historical moment. Remaking the past in order Tidying as We Go / 221 to remake the present betrays a considerable anxiety about that present as well as about history. It also assumes the relevance and the usefulness of the past, assumes the power of the past to shape the present moment, and assumes the cultural value of objects from the past. While the films discussed here may use different strategies for this project, they all invariably use adaptation to construct a narrative about the twenty-first century’s origins in the long eighteenth century that encourages a vision of the present moment considerably less conflicted than it would appear in light of historical narratives more willing to include discord, injustice, and error as part of past action and ideology. As Rachel Brownstein points out in Why Jane Austen?, the last twenty years have seen “an effective dismissal, or at least a high-handed under- reading and condescending rewriting, of what [Austen] wrote” as well as an erasure of “Austen’s critique of selfishness and greed and a society that measured human worth and human relationships in terms of land and money” through a fascination bordering on an “obsession” with Austen’s personal experience of “romance” in its most simplified sense. Crucially, Brownstein notes that our insistence on recasting Austen, and on using these terms to do it, reveals more about our current cultural moment than it does about Austen.8 In fact, what Brownstein calls “Jane-o-mania,” the explosion of Austen-related material from the 1990s, is part of a larger phenomenon that includes other film responses to works of literature.9 Such film responses to “classic” works of literature reveal an anxiety about the past and an eagerness not only to control or limit the relationship between past and present, but also to redefine the past as part of that controlling and limiting effort. They serve to limit through redefinition the relationship between past and present in order to facilitate a vision or version of the current moment. It is revisionism with all that term’s connotations in play. Becoming Jane is a case study; together, the films discussed here mark a trend. Austen’s conversion from a “great author” to a fortunately jilted woman is a key symptom of this enterprise. Recent film responses to Austen and her work, primarily The Real Jane Austen (2002), Becoming Jane (2007), Miss Austen Regrets (2008), The Jane Austen Trilogy (2010), and Gillian Anderson’s introductions to the Austen series on PBS in 2008, draw a direct connection between certain aspects of Austen’s personal history, some more speculative than others, and her novels in order to provide both an interpretation of the work and an explanation for the fact of Austen writing.10 Anderson’s statements that “Jane Austen is obviously making up for what’s missing in her own life and putting it in her fiction” or “Who taught Jane Austen to recognize and understand these feelings? Was it a young man called Tom Lefroy?” or the trailer for Becoming Jane that invites viewers to 222 / g e V i R T z “Discover Jane Austen’s untold romance, that would become the inspiration for her greatest love stories,” insist on reading the fiction as encoded autobiography.11 This approach is an extension of Jon Spence’s thesis in Becoming Jane Austen that if Austen’s relationship with Lefroy continued as late as 1796, then readers must conclude that the disappointment shaped her writerly choices until nearly the end of her life, thirty years later.12 Becoming Jane therefore is ostensibly a film adaptation of the speculative narrative that Spence crafts based on the 1796 letter.